Valley Spirit

The following is an extract from a private letter from one of the officers engaged in the bombardment.

"I am sure our success will rejoice your heart. It has been complete, and terror runs over the whole country. The negroes are wild, and plundering their master's houses. The whites have been driving the negroes away by force, and shooting them down, but they still come down to the gun-boats.

The moment General Drayton took to his horse in the panic of the 7th, his two hundred servants took to the Wabash--This is worthy of notice, as putting down the romance that the slaves were ready to fight for their masters. They surrounded Captain Ammen in crowds, at Beaufort, one of them calling out, in the joy of his heart:--'I didn't think you could do it, massa!"

At the outset of the difficulties which have culminated in open war between the two sections of our country, and when we were imploring the dominant party to make same concessions in order to avert the horrors of fraternal strife, we published official statistics of the resources of the South, taken from the Census reports of our own government. We did this with no purpose of creating or aiding rebellion anywhere, but merely to convince our belligerent Republican friends that the conquest of the South would be no holiday affair, and that in their frenzied partisan rancor they were deceiving themselves as to the powers of resistance of that division of the country. We knew that the South was not the powerless, poverty stricken country that Republicans who passed among their party for intelligent men were in the habit of representing it to be--we knew that it could not be whipped by a mere corporal's guard of United States soldiers, no matter how brave or how well disciplined they might be, and that it could not be starved into submission in a fortnight by cutting off its supplies of flour and bacon; and we wished to cram a little knowledge on these subjects into the heads of those who were brawling for war in preference to compromise. We wanted our own section of the Union, to which we are unchangeably attached, to go into the contest with its eyes open, if it went into it at all, to go in with a full knowledge of the strength and resources of its antagonist, and with adequate preparations for any emergency. For rendering this service to our own section of the country, we were denounced as secessionists by no inconsiderable number of the opposite party, and by a few professing "Democrats" who were several degrees blacker, as well as meaner, than the blackest among Black Republicans. We did not swerve from our course, however, for we very well know that time would vindicate us. And it has.

Immediately after the disastrous battle of Bull Run, Gov. Sprague went home to Rhode Island and in an official communication to the Legislature told them that the North deceived themselves in relation to the power and resources of the South, and that the Southern soldiers, instead of being half starved and half clothed, were in all respects better equipped than our own.--Gen. BURNSIDE went home and told the same story. And from that time to this, we have had from one prominent Republican after another, similar confessions of Northern ignorance and self-deception about Southern resources. We have been diligently collecting these Republican vindications of the Valley Spirit, with the intention of laying them before our readers; they can then judge of the extent and correctness of some peoples information who make pretensions to be a judge! When we publish these vindications, as we shall before long, our bitterest political opponent, if he has one grain of fairness in his whole body, he will be compelled to admit that the Valley Spirit was the only newspaper in the county that served the Union cause from the beginning, because it was the only one that gave correct information of the power and resources of the enemy. We shall on this point overwhelm our calumniators, with evidence drawn from the highest Republican sources.